On the wall of the academy, our quotes wall, where we have lots of different inspirational quotes that people can recommend or have recommended and that are just sat there so you can walk into there at any point and read something to pick up your spirits.
There is the quote from Michael Jordan about how many times he missed a game winning shot, about how many times he lost, about how many shots he missed through his career and the line about he's failed over and over and over again and that is why he succeeds.
And this is all good, isn't it?
We understand that learning from failure is the way to grow.
We understand that we rarely learn from winning, but we learn such deep and meaningful and long-lasting lessons when things don't go the way we want and that is all well and all good until you're in it.
The problem with learning from failure is it's painful and sometimes deeply painful, and usually most of the other people around you don't understand why you are struggling so much with the pain that you feel.
I can go back to thousands of events in my mind, from the past when I failed and when it hurt really badly and most of the time nobody understood why I was in such a state.
One of the ones that springs to mind now is having the last shot of my very first international as a young schoolboy international for Scotland against Ireland.
It was in Dundee and it was one of the most important nights of my life to date( maybe still falls into that category somewhere in the top 10 or 20).
I didn't start the game, wasn't good enough to be starting five for Scotland that year but I came on after a few minutes because the guy in my position just simply had stage fright and I played for the rest of the game.
I played ok I think if I recall I scored six points, which is not earth shattering, but at least I scored in my first international.
But we got to the end of the game and it was super super close the whole time.
With a fraction of seconds left on the clock, the ball fell to me outside the three point line. I was a pretty good three point shooter for my age; certainly could shoot over 50% of three pointers that I shot.
And there I was dreamland.
Three points down against Ireland with three or four seconds to play with the ball in your hands, ready to take the glory and for your life to take a path in another direction and I missed.
I was devastated after that, absolutely devastated and I remember my friend saying to me when I got back home “What's the matter with you and why are you so miserable?” because when we're in the middle of it, people just don't seem to understand how we see the problem or the difficulty.
I'm trying to figure out how I grew after that, how I got better or how I changed. I certainly went on to play international basketball for three years, and I certainly learned that ‘the good guy doesn't always win’.
And so, for those of you who have followed this blog over time, I'm a football coach to my son's football teams, now both Saturday and Sunday.
On Saturday, we are on the verge of winning the league, but it is really tight and really hard and U16’s football is brutal.
For one reason or another and not to be discussed here we've had a problem with our goalkeeper who's decided or whose family have decided that he won't be coming or turning up, but not telling us why really, and so we find ourselves right at the sharp end of the season with no keeper.
On Saturday, one of my lads stepped up and said that he would play in goal.
That is a magnanimous gesture because he is a great outfield player and doesn't want to play in goal but knows we can't play without having a goalkeeper.
In the game on Saturday which if we won, would have catapulted us really close to winning the league he had two real keeper errors, ones where you put your head in your hands and think, Oh my God and in the end it was 4-4. We couldn't manage to get the extra two points
Of course, there were other problems in that game and other mistakes in other areas where we shouldn't have lost goals or where we should have scored more, it should never have come down to thinking about those two keeper errors, but it did for him, it does for him and he was devastated after the game.
I saw myself from almost 40 years ago.
I tried to speak to him, but he was basically inconsolable.
The problem with all of this is that if you want to win, you have to be prepared to lose and actually you will lose at least some of the time and probably most of the time and losing hurts for most of us.
It's hard for my young lad whose name I don't really have to mention here.
It's hard because he's a great guy and he is brilliant and he will be better and better and he will look back on those things and understand why they made him better, but perhaps not for another 40 years.
How do we explain to people that you have to take the pain to grow?
How do we explain to people that we all have to do that so that we can all get better?
Blog Post Number - 3790
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